But Avatar Kinect, slated for launch this spring, may be of interest to some people. First announced by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at the International Consumer Electronics Show two weeks ago in Las Vegas, it will be a service through which you and your friends can interact, via your Xbox Live avatars, in a virtual Xbox chatroom.

Because it uses the new Kinect motion sensor, Avatar Kinect will be able to recognize a user’s facial movements — like expressions and raised eyebrows — and reproduce those movements on the user’s Xbox avatar. I’d expect Microsoft to eventually integrate Avatar Kinect with some of its existing avatar experiences, such as watching videos (Xbox users can watch movies together in a virtual theater populated with their avatars).

Check out the video below, from Ballmer’s CES announcement, to get a better idea of Avatar Kinect:

“Avatar Kinect is cool and a fairly amazing bit of tech but it is just the beta version of the Holodeck and we’ll see big leaps over the course of 2011,” Electricpic’s Mic Wright wrote on Jan. 6. “Imagine combining the Kinect smarts with the Sony Personal Display VR glasses which have also been shown at CES this year. It’s also inevitable that gloves to deliver haptic feedback from games and even full body suits will begin to arrive. Combine Kinect with glasses and haptic feedback along with Avatar Kinect’s ability to allow you to meet virtually with other Avatars and the Holodeck is here.”

Right. … Call me cynical, but Avatar Kinect sounds nothing to me like a “Star Trek” holodeck. It sounds a lot more to me like “Second Life.” Or — gasp! — PlayStation Home. But with facial expressions.

Wright’s piece, however, deserves a read. He compares Avatar Kinect to some of the first science fiction written about cyberspace — namely the novels “Count Zero,” by William Gibson, and “Snow Crash,” by Neal Stephenson.

Neal Stephenson really pushed the idea of the online “avatar” in his seminal 1992 novel “Snow Crash.” The Sanskrit term “avatar” had been used in the 1986 video game “Habitat,” but Stephenson was not aware of that when he applied it to the virtual bodies used by his characters in the metaverse within “Snow Crash.”

Lots of the ideas developed by Stephenson in “Snow Crash” have come to pass – the Earth software used by the CIA in “Snow Crash” is pretty similar to Google Earth – and now it looks like Avatar Kinect is making the “avatar” of his novel a reality. It can’t be too long before a secondary market in clothes for your new avatar develops just as it has for standard Xbox Live avatars. Interestingly, former Microsoft Xbox head honcho J Allard used the name Hiro Protagonist (the main character in “Snow Crash”) as his Xbox Live gamertag.

Do you think Avatar Kinect sounds cool? Is it a promising step toward technologies like the “Star Trek” holodeck? Or does it seem to you more like a gimmick? Curious minds would like to know.